Playing for Learning: A Student Engagement Assessment on Edutainment Game based on User Experience

Crafting a good digital experience for children can be difficult; game designers have to consider children's cognitive and motor skill limitations, understand their target audience, create something entertaining and educational at the same time. This should also comply with national and international jurisdiction, and time appeal to parents as well. In this paper the researchers used of an educational game called Tahderiyyah Literacy App (TLA) with standard general framework which designers and developers created for children ages four to six years old. This platform has been the testing ground for the edutainment game in the field of user experience. The purpose of the paper is to observe the interactions, experience and adaptation of kindergarten pupil (learners) on a particular on the TLA based on game's user experience. TLA was design using their mother tongue which can be played on mobile devices. Focusing only to learners from Muslim Community. While the term User Experience encompasses both physical and digital experiences, the main focus for the framework is purely for digital services wherein only touch based devices are evaluated in greater detail. On the assessment process, students were observed and interviewed about the game and what they learned about numbers and letters from game they played. This process was done to help the kindergarten answers their questionnaires. Every learner that act as respondents were guided to answer the answer the questionnaires given to them. Results of using TLA to analyze an HCI factors in learning environment are described in the later part of this paper. Implications for using TLA as a design for pedagogical tool are also discussed.